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Global Racial Inequality Keeps Children Away From School
Posted by: | CommentsAround the world, children from ethnic, racial and linguistic minorities are being left behind in the quest for universal education, according to Lauren Feeney, multimedia producer for PBS’s documentary television series, Wide Angle. Feeney explains that the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets for international development agreed to at the turn of the millennium, call for universal primary education by 2015. While some progress has been made towards that goal in the last decade — today, nearly 90 percent of children are enrolled in primary school, compared to 85 percent in 2000.
Even as that is a victory to celebrate, there remain 75 million children are still out of school; and of those, the majority are children from racial and ethnic minority groups. Although the U.N. doesn’t track progress based on racial or ethnic criteria, but a new report from Minority Rights Group International estimates that between 50 and 70 percent of out of school children are from minority and indigenous populations.
This kind of racial inequality exists around the globe, in Latin America, in Australia, in Africa, in India and in Europe. As Joe wrote here recently, the treatment of Roma in Europe is one that is steeped in racism that few are willing to face. Indeed, speaking out about their treatment prompted crowds to boo pop-icon Madonna for speaking out in support of them. When it comes to the treatment of the Roma, and how Roma children are doing meeting the Millennium Development Goals, it’s difficult to tell. Fenney writes that most reports on the Millennium Development Goals don’t bother to track progress in highly developed countries such as those in the European Union, which Romania joined in 2007. But Snjezana Bokulic, the Minority Rights Group International program officer for Europe, says that conditions for the Roma minority are “comparable to sub-Saharan Africa,” so, while European countries are likely to surpass most of the goals, “a segment of the population will be left out.” As for the goal of universal primary education, only 31 percent of Roma in Romania complete primary school, and Roma comprise between 2 and 10 percent of the population (depending on who’s counting), so the goal is unlikely to be met. “It’s an issue of mathematics,” says Bokulic.
Extrapolating from the non-data-collection on Roma in Europe, I assume that these reports are not being collected on indigenous and racial/ethnic minority groups here in the U.S. either. That would be a worthy research project for someone to do is find out what percentage of indigenous and migrant workers children are enrolled in school.
In a rather striking example of what happens when you fail to take into account intersections of race, class and gender, the Millennium Development Goals include a specific provision calling for an end to gender disparity at all levels of education, but there is no similar targeting of disparity based on racial or ethnic difference. One observer from the Minority Rights Group calls this a “glaring omission.” Maurice Bryan, who contributed the chapter on Latin America to the Minority Rights Group International report, says that no one realized it at the time, and goes on to say this:
“People didn’t used to think that you should pay special attention to women but once they realized that it was necessary, there has been progress on the gender gap. Now the racial gap is the new kid on the block.”
I found that a remarkable quote. While it’s pointless to try and say which is “more” or “less” necessary – it’s both and – I was just found it interesting that at least according to Millennium Goals the idea of addressing of gender is more established than the idea of addressing racism and inequality. If it’s still the case that 50-70 percent of the world’s children who are not in school are from ethnic or indigenous populations, then it seems long overdue to start addressing this form of inequality.
Rachel Maddow: Correcting the Record on Pat’s Racist Rant
Posted by: | CommentsRachel Maddow took a few minutes at the end of last night’s show to correct the record on Pat Buchanan’s racist rant about ‘white men built this nation.’ In case you missed it, here’s what she said (6:58):
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I think she did a pretty good job on this. She gets bonus points from me for the line about affirmative action being necessary “so that we as a country don’t end up sealing in place forever a white supremacist society, created by and defined by segregation and Jim Crow.” What do you think about her rebuttal?
Race, Racism & White Supremacy: Link Roundup
Posted by: | CommentsHere are some interesting links on race, racism and white supremacy. The blogosphere seems to be heating up on some of these issues. There is no shortage of racism material to write on!
The Holocaust Museum Attack and Cyberhate
- Rinku Sen writes about The White Supremacist in All of Us at the Huffington Post. Sen criticizes the discussion of the Holocaust Museum shooting has boiled down to the idea that racism is an intentional, violent act of a lone crazy white man. She writes “Collectively, we bemoan the backwardness of ’some’ people before we move on, thinking of racism as isolated extremism.”
- Christopher Wolf, a D.C. attorney and former head of the International Network Against Cyberhate, writes about the Hatemongers New Tool: The Internet for CBS News.
- C.N. at The Colorline has an excellent analysis of Internet Technology, White Supremacy & Internet Technology
- Leonard Lopate of WNYC interviews Leonard Zeskind about von Brunn and the history of the white supremacist movement in his Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream.
- David Niewert writes at Crooks and Liars about the infiltration of the army by neo-nazis, first reported by Salon this week. Jim Burroway at Box Turtle points out the irony of a military that is happy to include white supremacists but not openly LGBT members.
- Jesse Walker thinks the threat of right-wing terror has been blown out of proportion.
- Joshua Holland at Alternet has some probing thoughts on the Eliminationist (that is, killing) Mindset of many on the racist right.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor
- Transgriot calls out Pat Buchanan – and others of the “vanilla privileged” class - for their treatment of Sotomayor.
Education
- Over at DailyKos, Tristero 312 has a good analysis of the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) charges at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that argue the educational policies of school “turnarounds,” one of the “Renaissance 2010″ policies, is discriminatory, especially for black teachers.
Demography
- Over at Asian-Nation, there is an interesting analysis of some U.S. demographic data showing that among Asian-Indian, Chinese, and Korean Americans, there is a significant gender imbalance among children, boys being more common than girls, as in some Asian countries—apparently mainly for Asian immigrant couples in which both spouses are foreign-born.
Pop Culture
- Feministing offers a discussion of Melissa Harris-Lacewell’s critique of Tavis Smiley’s recent documentary “Stand,” in a provocative post called, Aretha v. Beyonce: Please Don’t Let this Be the Future of Political Discourse
- And, Newsweek did a cover story on Oprah’s controversial on-air medical advice (related to ‘cures’ for autism) and then poses the question “Is it Racist to Criticize Oprah?”
Idiocy in America
- And, though not online and not exactly on racism issues, there is the new book Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce. The book is uneven, full of ranting on conservatives like Limbaugh (who deserve it), but the general points are quite accurate about stupidity becoming a virtue. Here is his response to a question in an interview: “With the election of President Obama, is Idiot America coming to an end? Or, will there always be a place for idiocy in America?” [Pierce answers]: Look at the political opposition to President Obama. “Socialist!” “Fascist!” “Coming to get your guns.” Hysteria from the hucksters of Idiot America is still at high-tide. People are killing other people and specifically attributing their action to imaginary oppression stoked by radio talk-show stars and television pundits.
Black Masculinity
- Mark Anthony Neal offers his readers a review of the book, Performing Black Masculinity: Race, Culture and Queer Identity (AltaMira Press, 2006), by Bryan Keith Alexander.
White Prof, White Pride
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Today’s Inside Higher Ed includes an article about Robert S. Griffin, a tenured professor who has taught education classes at the University of Vermont for nearly 40 years and written extensively and sympathetically about white nationalism and white supremacy. Griffin’s own (non-University) website includes a links page to a number of white nationalist and white supremacist organizations and websites, including David Duke’s website and Stormfront: White Pride Worldwide (both of whom I discuss at length in Cyber Racism). The image included here is of Griffin appearing on a 2006 cover of American Renaissance (image used without permission, from here). The Southern Poverty Law Center includes Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance as one of the four leading proponents of “academic racism.” Here’s what the SPLC has to say:
Jared Taylor, the man who heads the New Century Foundation and edits its American Renaissance magazine, presents himself as a cosmopolitan, open-minded thinker not afraid to take on the taboos of his time without stooping to racial epithets and the like. But, in fact, he is a man who promotes the “clear conception of the United States as a nation ruled by and for whites,” …
This is the pose that Griffin has adopted as well, that of the “cosmopolitan, open-minded thinker not afraid to take on taboos.”
In his 2006 article called, “A Knock on the Door: Writing for AR – Coming out of the closet is not always easy,” that accompanies the cover image above, Griffin reflects on the fallout from his initial experience of writing for American Renaissance and the mainstream press that followed it. By likening this writing to ‘coming out of the closet,’ Griffin acknowledges the illicit nature of his collaboration with the magazine but this only fuels his certitude about his views.
Griffin mainly uses the article to quote himself being quoted. The crux of his argument boils down to calling him a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist or a hatemonger is mere “namecalling and mudslinging.” Furthermore, Griffin claims that he is simply engaging in “ethnic pride,” and attempts to call him to task for this are part of a “double standard” in which “pride and self-determination” are good for minority folks, “but the very same things in white people are bad.” He then quotes his own attempt at humor in an interview:
“The late comedian Lenny Bruce told a joke about a guy who, when caught in the act of cheating by his wife, says to her, ‘Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?’ I’d like to think that in matters of race more and more white people are getting past the Orwellian newspeak that has been coming at them for decades and starting to look hard at reality for themselves. That is what I’m doing.”
And then, Griffin ends on a self-congratulatory note:
“I was beginning to stand up for myself — and my race. Not bad.”
The Inside Higher Ed article interviews Heidi Beirich, director of research for the Southern Poverty Law Center, who says:
“no mystery” in her mind that Griffin is a neo-Nazi. “It’s an amazing thing to see a tenured professor at a serious university writing a fawning biography of a neo-Nazi nut — just shocking,” she said.
Beirich urged The University of Vermont to investigate the professor’s classroom activities and condemn his work. Yet, the university as an institution and at least one colleague of Griffin’s are standing by him and defending his views as bringing “a perspective to multicultural issues that is different from what dominates the field.”
The problem here, in my view, with people who are appalled by Griffin’s views — and they are appalling — is that they the standard white liberal response is insufficient to to the task because it only concedes Griffin’s premise. Calling him a “neo-Nazi” allows Griffin to continue to claim the high ground in this debate and assert that he is “interested in ideas” while others are merely engaged in name-calling. Similarly, attempts to discredit his assertions of ethnic pride within the context of multiculturalism-absent-an-analysis-of-power is equally fraught. In a multi-vocal world where “all voices” are valued equally, there is no basis for critiquing white pride.
The key that’s missing in this debate is an analysis of power and white privilege, and these have everything to do with knowledge. Epistemologies of race, that is, how we know what we say we know about race and racism, are rooted in profoundly different experiences for whites and people of color living in a social context of racial inequality. Within such a context, some people experience the constant drumbeat of racism as part of their everyday life, while others enjoy the privilege of ignoring race and racism on a daily basis. The danger in views like those of Griffin’s is in the pernicious way that his claims to “knowledge” challenge important values that are politically hard won, values such as racial equality.
White Supremacy, Racism, and the Obama Administration, Pt.2
Posted by: | CommentsThese are the final two provocative theses from Clarence J. Munford. He is Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada. Among his books are Race and Civilization: Rebirth of Black Centrality (Africa World Press 2001) and American Crucible: Black Enslavement, White Capitalism and Imperial Globalization (Africa World Press forthcoming, June 2009).
THESIS THREE
At this moment antiracists and other progressives need be circumspect in our criticism of the agenda and policies of the Obama administration (
photo credit: couturiere7 ). First, because it is
figuratively the only game in play. Second, because bad-tempered faultfinding would alienate nearly the entire African American community, still enthralled as it is in the historic symbolism and adulation of a black presidency in the “world’s most powerful country.” Third, because the only likely alternative to Barack Obama to emerge from the 2012 election will be the neo-Nazi, closet-KKK types and religious fundamentalists nesting under the Republican Party “tent.”
Yet we would be remiss in our duty if we failed to offer constructive critique that fosters progressive social reform. For instance, was the decision to boycott the United Nations antiracism conference in April 2009 indicative of the administration’s true stripes? Was the shunning – to paraphrase Shakespeare – a whiff of something rotten in Washington, DC’s Denmark? Must U.S. foreign policy remain forever hostage to Israeli hawks? America’s absence from the Geneva conference had even the Congressional Black Caucus – Obama’s most rock-solid legislative ally – wondering. The concept of modernization of the oppression of African Americans aids comprehension. It suggests that second class citizenship resists cosmetic changes regardless of the personnel in the White House.
During his “First Hundred Days” Obama’s “crisis management” aimed to reduce unemployment through job creation. His stimulus program included funds and measures to lessen mortgage foreclosures. Threatened homeowners were promised mortgage renegotiation along more favorable terms. At least as talking points, the government put environmental improvement, alternative energy and strategic raw materials savings on the table. Cooperation between the federal government, organized labor and the private sector is seen as a kind of magic wand. Sought is equilibrium between the national economy and the basic components of civil society.
Meanwhile corporate capital continues to manipulate the organs of state to distribute the national income in ways favorable to itself. Obama has set sights on reviving the stock market and talks in populist terms of affordable health care (but only in the dubious insurance scheme, not in the universal, single-payer form) in order to maintain political capital. The challenge is to speed the capitalist periodical cycle into a recovery phase while juggling big bonuses at firms that have swallowed billions of bailout dollars, auto industry meltdown, the AIG fiasco and growing demands for nationalization of the country’s most dysfunctional banks.
The depression has exposed widespread immiseration that can no longer be “spin”-glossed away by the mouthpieces of U.S.-dominated raciated global supremacy. More than merely turning the country around economically, progressives want Obama to face up to the system’s all-round failure to meet human needs. Job opportunities are unfilled due to unskilled or untrained applicants, while growing millions are being laid off. And what spooks the powers-that-be is the fact that now the jobless are not just blacks and Hispanics, but so-called mainstream whites as well. Grappling with neglected human needs, progressive forces demand from Obama more than just swift, but temporary, stimuli. They call for staunch and permanent government intervention. Only the state can harmonize mass employment, the need for trained workers and social needs. Barack Obama’s program looks to quicken the job market through health insurance spending, home mortgage assistance and infrastructure repairs and initiatives.
Yet it is a matter of debate whether the reformers in Obama’s corner realize that in contemporary racist capitalism mass unemployment (twice as heavy among blacks than among whites) is at once conjunctural and structural. It is a product of the periodical cycle and of deindustrialization in favor of service industries, of “off-shoring,” and of swelling social emphasis on communications-electronics. At issue are fundamental processes of capital accumulation. The Obama administration has grounds to expect jobs to be created through new investments, thus justifying all the talks of a “New New Deal.” But large-scale devalorization of much black male labor power has been long underway before the present economic bubble burst. That devalorization demonstrates that capital accumulation never has as its goal the protection or creation of jobs.
Capitalists accumulate, expand, rationalize and modernize enterprises in order to garner high profits. This generates schizophrenia for the Obama stimulus. On one hand, to mollify his electorate and pay political IOUs, the president must save homes and put people to work through health, energy, regulatory and infrastructure measures. On the other hand, as the administrator of state capitalism, he must protect and revivify the existing system of white supremacist capitalism. Once troubled enterprises are “stress-tested,” trimmed, modernized and regulated, once they are ready to yield stable high profits, they must be returned to the private sector free of federal government sway. On behalf of private capitalists the administration is mandated to manage, invest taxpayer dollars, partially nationalize and break UAW labor contracts. Such is the real meaning of rationalization, efficiency and higher productivity under racist capitalism. Success for this agenda would be long-term elimination of work places, not more jobs. As currently projected, the Obama stimulus and regulation of financial institutions down the road will shrink the demand for living labor power.
To keep this from happening, progressives and antiracists must inject radical elixir in the Obama White House. That is the only way to expand well-paid, secure employment, particularly for the sorely-tried African American community. Programming, projections, French-style dirigiste planning for express rail links, energy independence and other “leftist” concepts not heard in Washington, DC since the 1930s and the New Deal, have now become common currency inside the Beltway. These are manifestations of capitalist reformist jitters. Short of an impact by a strong radical public, they most definitely are not the “transformative” harbingers of an equitable, antiracist society designed to meet the needs of all of its citizens that many first-time voters thought they heard in the Obama campaign rhetoric. The president wants to intensify the role of the federal government merely enough to enliven the economy. But why must the affair stop there? What if a broad neo-Abolitionist coalition of blacks, browns and antiracist whites can be forged in time to intervene? Its pressure could induce Americans to realize that it is not necessary to bribe the corporate and financial moguls with bailouts, bonuses, interest and profits to obtain the necessities of life.
THESIS FOUR
Global white supremacy would lose what remains of its integral character without the seemingly limitless malleability of second class citizenship in the USA coupled with ongoing modernization of oppression of the black world as a whole. Though nearly five hundred years old, the African Diaspora in the Americas has yet to experience true liberation. What has been endured in the last two hundred years is a series of refurbishments of bondage, disguised as “emancipations.” Each modernization has occurred at a critical turning point in history when the system of black servitude was in crisis and seemed threatened with collapse. The Obama administration appears to be one such turning point.
Hitherto each revamp has involved some great confrontation like the Civil War or the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Each regeneration has saved the day for white supremacy by discarding the unnecessary frills of white domination (i.e., the “petty apartheids”), while rescuing the essentials of black subjugation. Each update has revealed the bitter truth that social equality and racially proportionate economic parity can never be accomplished without breaking the back of white supremacy. The staged incremental progress African Americans are alleged to have benefited from in the course of the twentieth century, culminating in the election of Barack Obama, is, in fact, contingency-rooted, episodic streamlining of the forms of second-class citizenship. The kernel of black oppression has remained stable, regardless of the election of black officials, and regardless of leeway for civil rights, intermarriage, integrated housing, voting rights and limited job opportunities. The notion of modernization of second-class citizenship for African Americans is an elaboration and articulation of the fundamental thesis of a series of modernizations of enslavement experienced in all parts of the black world during the last half-millennium.
Nonetheless, there is a serious alternative to white supremacist capitalist society. That vision postulates an end to global white supremacy, the heart of global capitalism. It requires a concerted political effort by progressive forces to build an economy that binds government control of the commanding heights of the economy with small private enterprises and community firms in an organic fashion. In order to qualify as truly post-racist, America would have to install a human and constitutional rights system in place of the travesty we now endure. It would have to impose social equality, evenhanded justice and socioeconomic parity. Black political empowerment proportionate to population percentage would have to be enshrined in the Constitution. Policy would have to ensure “equality of results” for the black community and other racialized minorities.
White Supremacy, Racism and the Obama Administration, Pt.1
Posted by: | CommentsThese are the first two theses of four from the distinguished international scholar of racial matters, Clarence J. Munford. The next two will be posted tomorrow.
THESIS ONE
The original (so-called primitive) capital accumulation – the wealth that enabled Western civilization to erect its global domination – was actually an accumulation of enslaved African human beings. Having decimated the indigenous Amerindians in the Caribbean, Brazil and other parts of Central and South America, the white conquerors turned to Africa for the means to establish sway over the Western Hemisphere.
Nowadays the “free world’s” lighthouse sits in Washington, DC, an acknowledged fact internationally. Less avowed is the brute fact that the chief agency by which European civilization appropriated and incorporated the vast territory north of the Rio Grande, and established the United States of America, was the forced labor of enslaved Africans. Modern capitalism in the Western Hemisphere is the child of racialized black enslavement. Centuries of chattel bondage conditioned the formation of the African American race, reinforced by post-slavery discrimination, segregation and second-class citizenship. These are social relations, rules dictated to persons and communities. Social relations, mediated in history, outweighed biological reproduction in creating America’s black “minority race.”
Despite a rather common heritage of material culture, black folks’ enslaved ancestors came from many different ethnic groups and spoke many different tongues. The boundaries of the plantations ignored these ethnic divisions. When the time came for procreation, the will of the slaveholder and the limits of the plantation regulated sexual intercourse. Plantation endogamy smashed pristine ethnicity. Most couplings were within the same plantation or neighboring ones – no matter that Mbundu had to mate with Ewe, Wolof with Ibo, Yoruba with Fon… Meanwhile the sexual rampages of slaveholders and overseers injected a Caucasian strain in all but a fifth of African Americans. For a long time slaveholders were not minded to balance the gender ratio among slaves. Enslaved Africans first arrived in Virginia in 1619. Not until the 1840s were there as many black women as there were black men in the United States. America’s truest “melting pot” was stirred of transplanted Africans, a unique new people smelted in slavery’s crucible.
The social composition and profile of black America changed radically in the first half of the twentieth century. From the Great Migration (ca. 1915-1919) to the deindustrializing 1970s, the prominent new stratum was urban industrial workers. Black folk became predominately city folk. Nevertheless, the black community remained subservient to the white citizenry. The autoworker as much as the sleeping car porter, the preacher as much as the entertainer, each one of the now ghettoized African Americans was slotted somehow or other in the social hierarchy in a way compatible with the white man’s interests. Transformed by waves of migration and metropolitan overcrowding, black America was prescribed a role to play that was really the same old role in new costume. Its function in the social division of labor was unambiguous. There is nothing equivocal about that black “underclass” which serves as an elastic pool of cheap reserve labor, portions of which are destined for lifelong joblessness.
Over the last thirty years or so, large numbers of African Americans have moved to the suburbs. Decaying city cores have been abandoned to growing concentrations of black and Latino paupers, the “underclass” and the homeless. Many city cores are being gentrified, exiling even these desperate unfortunates. Ironically, even latter-day suburbanization is compelled to fit the national mold of black-white residential apartheid. Black suburbanization proceeds on the basis of black resegregation. Chunks of the inner city ghetto are dispersed as all-black pockets around the wider area. The ghetto does not evaporate; it multiplies with smaller offshoots hiving off. Residential apartheid is alive and well, now also living in the suburbs.
Even more insidious is the bond between the prison industrial system and economic revalorization. In so far as black “underclass” job seekers find no employers, they are excluded from the national market for commodity labor power. This particular phenomenon long predates the current employment crash precipitated by the capitalist recession of 2007-2009, and will long post-date it. Economically, anything that for whatever reason has no purchaser, has no price. Price is the money form of value. Without a price, an object, or in this case a human capacity, becomes in effect valueless. During the last forty years, thousands of black males’ ability to work has been stripped of a price, unsellable on the labor market and thus value-less in a strict economic sense. In the eyes of white supremacist capital, these men, and increasingly some black women too, become revalored (value restored) only when they are put to work in jail. This is revalorization through mass incarceration and the prison economy. What takes place in the prison industrial complex has been termed mystifyingly “intra-systemal commoditization of unfree labor.” The terms mean merely that in our prisons today labor power, which in the outside world appears on the market as a commodity and is sold for a price (wages), is being extracted from inmates – often involuntarily – at or well below the minimum wage standard. From shore to shore America’s cellblock inmates are disproportionately black. This practice is a giant step towards reviving the convict lease-labor system of Jim Crow vintage. The United States sports the highest rate of incarceration in the world. Read More→
Cyber Racism on the Rise: Traffic up at White Supremacists Sites
Posted by: | CommentsThe Washington Post is reporting that the traffic is up at white supremacist sites (hat tip to Bryan for letting me know about this article). The drive behind this increased interest in the white supremacist message seems to be Sen. Obama’s historic victories in the Democratic primaries. Estimating the number of hate groups and hate sites is always difficult, and now, that number is an ever-moving target. One of the experts interviewed for the article, Deborah Lauter, civil rights director for the Anti-Defamation League, observes:
“The truth is, we’re finding an explosion in these kinds of hateful sentiments on the Net, and it’s a growing problem,” said , which monitors hate group activity. “There are probably thousands of Web sites that do this now. I couldn’t even tell you how many are out there because it’s growing so fast.”
While there’s little to suggest that the white supremacist sites are going to launch a serious political challenge to Obama’s candidacy, but you can be sure that the struggle over race, racism and white supremacy has shifted to the Internet. Indeed, as the Washington Post article notes, earlier this month, Obama’s campaign launched its own site to refute the rumors that hate-mongers spread on the Internet. The site lists a series of myths and lies about Obama — that he is Muslim; that his books contain racist passages; that his wife, Michelle, used the word “whitey” — and debunks them.
At the same time, white supremacists are also engaged in a struggle over racial truths and myths online, according to the article:
Don Black spends 16 hours each day on his laptop computer reading hundreds of derogatory Obama comments posted on Stormfront.org, a Web site with the motto “white pride world wide.” A site that drew a few thousand visitors per day in 2002 has expanded into Black’s full-time job, attracting more than 40,000 unique users each day who can post on 54 different message boards…
The article goes on to note that “almost all” white supremacist websites are reporting an increase in traffic. In my new book, Cyber Racism, I explore what the real threat of these sites might be. I argue that there are three main threats, including: 1) easy access and global linkages (white supremacist discourse is easier to access because of the Internet and it’s easier for white supremacists to connect with each other); 2) harm in real life (sometimes, white supremacists take violent action against people based on their beliefs); and 3) cultural values (in other words, these sites represent a threat to the way we acquire and produce knowledge about race, racism and civil rights in the digital era). To illustrate that third threat, about how racism online threatens cultural values and our ways of knowing, let me share a quote with you from David Duke, another white supremacist who is quite active online:
“The Internet gives millions access to the truth that many didn’t even know existed. Never in the history of man can powerful information travel so fast and so far. I believe that the Internet will begin a chain reaction of racial enlightenment that will shake the world by the speed of its intellectual conquest.”
As David Duke suggests in this quote, his goal in bringing white supremacy to the Internet is “racial enlightenment” by making “the truth” available to millions via the Internet. Duke’s brand of white supremacy seeks to undermine hard-won political battles for racial and ethnic equality by rearticulating an essentialist notion of white racial purity using the rhetoric of “civil rights.”
From my perspective, Duke represents an example of the epistemology of white supremacy. The epistemology of white supremacy is, as philosopher Charles W. Mills has noted, “an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance,” which produces the ironic outcome that whites in general, are “unable to understand the world that they themselves have made.” The epistemology of white supremacy reinforces the white racial frame by allowing whites to retreat from pluralistic civic engagement and into a whites-only digital space where they can question the cultural values of tolerance and racial equality unchallenged by anyone outside that frame.
As the lived experience of the civil rights movement fades with time, hard-won political truths about racial equality slide into the realm of mere opinion, open to multiple interpretations. In my book, I discuss at length what’s at stake here with cyber racism, but for now, let me just share a couple of brief examples. In interviews I conducted with young people as they surf the Internet for information about “civil rights,” I asked them how they interpreted the sites they were reading. In the first example, a young (teen-aged) woman reads a cloaked white supremacist site describing American slavery as a “sanitary, humane, relaxed” institution, and remarks, “well, I guess there’s two sides to everything.”
In another example, a different young woman, reading a legitimate civil rights site associated with The King Center in Atlanta, questions the site’s validity because, “it’s created by his widow, so it could be biased.” The two sites, and the two misinterpretations of them, suggest that the very ideas of “civil rights” and “racial equality” become eroded within a digital media landscape that renders all websites more or less equivalent. While the cloaked site and the King Center site both present information from differing points-of-view, just saying that each is “biased” is to misunderstand the larger meaning here. It’s precisely taking into account the standpoint of the site and the reader — whether situated in the white supremacist movement or in struggle for civil rights and against racism — that facilitates the more accurate reading.
As white supremacists shape the online struggle for definitions about race, racism, civil rights, indeed for “truth” shifts in the new digital landscape, we need more and better critical thinking about race, that is informed by standpoint theory.
